Best practices for multithreaded processing of database records

Question

I have a single process that queries a table for records where PROCESS_IND = \'N\', does some processing, and then updates the PROCESS_IND to \'Y\'

Answer 1

The most obvious way is locking, if your database doesn't have locks, you could implement it yourself by adding a "Locked" field.

Some of the ways to simplify the concurrency is to randomize the access to unprocessed items, so instead of competition on the first item, they distribute the access randomly.